A powerful live performance that also has some troubling aspects [WH]

Johannes Brahms (b. 1962)
Ein deutsches Requiem, Op. 45 (1868)
Edith Mathis (soprano); Andreas Schmidt (baritone)
Berlin Philharmonic Chorus; Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra/Antal Doráti
rec. live, 15 November 1986, Grosser Sendessaal, Sender Freies [Radio] Berlin, Germany
Antal Doráti Centenary Society ADL349 [78]

It is near-impossible to provide a definitive date for many of Brahms’s works because he took his time over them, often leaving them aside to work on something else. There are references to a ‘German Requiem’ in correspondence dating from more than ten years before what is usually accepted as its first performance, conducted by the composer himself, in 1868. Even this performance, however, was incomplete, as he added a seventh movement – which he placed fifth – the following year. Brahms resisted the idea that the work was a memorial tribute to his mother who had died in 1865; yet the text of the added movement, at least, would seem to make explicit such an association. Furthermore, it is the only movement that calls for a soprano soloist. That soloist in this live performance was the Swiss soprano, Edith Mathis, who died in February this year two days before her 87th birthday. Your reaction to her opening phrases will condition how you feel about her performance as a whole. Her wide and heavy vibrato, and slides up to and between notes, seem far from the pure motherliness that I am persuaded Brahms had in his mind while composing this music. I have not heard Mathis’s DG recording of the work with Barenboim, but a live performance conducted by Kubelík can be seen on YouTube, and there the characteristics that disturb me are less in evidence. Neither Sylvia McNair, with Masur (Teldec), nor Lucia Popp with Sinopoli (DG) are completely free of these qualities, but they are milder, and there is considerably more light and shade in the singing. For sheer open-throated simplicity, though, you need Lynne Dawson, singing with minimal vibrato under Roger Norrington’s direction on Virgin. (I have not heard his later performance from Stuttgart.)

A contemporary review quoted in the minimalist insert that accompanies this disc – sung texts are not provided – refers to the soloists’ roles as ‘somewhat thankless’. I find this strange. The choir is, of course, the star of the show, singing almost throughout; but the two soloists are of crucial importance too. Andreas Schmidt is excellent in his two movements, devout, expressive, and forceful when indicated, the high F at the end of his first phrase delivered with considerable power without forfeiting beauty of tone.

It is clear from the outset that the choir’s contribution will be a distinguished one. The sound is rich and homogeneous, with internal balance as clear as the live recording allows. The sopranos are heroic as they launch the final movement – barely a trace of fatigue – and the basses back them up valiantly. Listen to those sopranos, too, as they rise to a high A at the end of the first movement, and they are just as impressive when the same music is so memorably brought back to end the whole work. This really is lovely singing.  The tenors’ quiet singing in the well-known and treasured ‘How lovely are thy dwellings’ deserves special mention, and when the altos remind us, in the closing pages of the work, that ‘blessed are the dead who die in the Lord’ they are so tender that we are perfectly happy to believe them. The sheer beauty of the choral sound is allied throughout to singing of great accuracy and discipline, evidence of fine preparation by Uwe Gronostay.

So central is the choir in Brahms’s masterpiece that we might think of the orchestra as being of secondary importance. This would be a grave error, as the work is full of felicitous touches of orchestration. The harp is not an instrument I readily associate with Brahms: it appears in only three of the seven movements – the player must be patient! – but when it does the effect is magical. More typical of the composer is his use of the horns, awe-inspiring in the second movement, lyrical and tender in the fourth and elsewhere. The use of the wind choir for support and colour is another Brahms characteristic. Doráti carefully brings out many details of orchestration. One of them, in particular, always pleases this listener, a sudden and unexpected downwards triplet from the second horn at the return of the main theme of the fourth movement. It is perfectly audible here.

Antal Doráti was 86 when he conducted this performance in Berlin. He launches the work at a steady tempo that is nicely maintained throughout the first movement, successfully creating the mood of calm consolation that is so important a characteristic of the work. Doráti insists on quite heavy accents on the word ‘weinen’ (weeping) in the famous passage from Psalm 126, and this is, in its way, a sign of things to come. In the second movement, Doráti has the sopranos and altos place a heavy accent on the second syllable of the word ‘verdorret’, reminding us that grass eventually withers, and so will we. There is yet more heavy emphasis in the fourth movement, notably on the choir’s quavers at the words ‘die loben Dich immerdar’ (‘they will still be praising Thee’) which I find a pity as it rather undermines the relaxed, smiling atmosphere that the team has created at that point. This desire to emphasise the drama of many passages also leads to a shortage of real legato singing. There were so many examples of phrases chopped up into detached notes at the expense of a singing line that I stopped marking them in my notes. Some of this may be the result of Gronostay’s work, of course, but choice of tempi must surely be Doráti’s alone The opening music of the second movement – Brahms’s tempo indication is simply ‘Slow’, but with the added words ‘marching pace’, curious for music in triple time – is taken very slowly indeed. Doráti needs 17 minutes for this movement, whereas Sinopoli, himself no speed merchant, is the next slowest on my shelves, at 15:40. Masur, on the other hand, dispatches the movement in a little under 12 minutes. You might, like me, sometimes wish that Brahms had thought again about his decision to bring back this long opening passage, note for note, a second time. If so, your doubts will be confirmed by Doráti’s performance. The tempo for the closing fugue is less controversial, and most of it is superb, though tension flags dangerously at certain points. Then there is the rather Handelian fugue that closes the sixth movement (Herr, du bist würdig). Death and the grave have been vanquished allowing us to praise the Lord in all his glory. This is, then, joyful and affirmative music – in brilliant C major – and Doráti more than has the measure of it, yet even here there is more of the kind of detached singing that ensures the absence of line, and which disappoints this listener. The most extraordinary passage, however, occurs in the third movement. The build-up to the long closing fugal passage is undeniably powerful if excessively drawn-out, but the fugue itself – ‘Die gerechten Seelen sind in Gottes Hand’ – is quite extraordinarily slow, a solid, stolid eight-in-a-bar such as I have never heard anywhere. Timings for the whole movement are interesting again here: Doráti, 12 minutes; Klemperer, of all people, a few seconds short of 10; Masur shaves a further minute off Klemperer’s timing, and Norrington relinquishes half a minute more. Tempo is, of course, a very subjective subject, but the text here, again positive and celebratory, is hardly reflected in Doráti’s heavy and lumbering treatment.

There are many fine recorded performances of this glorious work, of which I have heard only a few. Among those which respond best to my own feelings about the work, and which also stand up well to objective judgement, are two classics of the gramophone, Klemperer (EMI/Warner) and, more recently, John Eliot Gardiner (Philips). Closer still to my ideal are Kurt Masur and Roger Norrington, two conductors whose work I have always admired, albeit for different reasons. There are a number of aspects to this live performance from Antal Doráti that trouble me, but it is none the less a reading of great cumulative power, and I will certainly come back to it. It clearly had a profound effect on its audience. Nearly 25 seconds of silence follow the final notes, and many were reluctant to break the mood by applauding even then.

William Hedley

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